Virtual blood, real sweat, no tears: lessons learned from making a publication about electronic publications

The EIA Electronic Document Report (EDR) provides critical information and informed perspective for business people concerned with the role that electronic information will play in meeting the business objectives of enhanced performance and competitiveness. As publishers, we use the very technology and tools that the EDR describes for developing, managing, delivering, and using electronic documents. Creating an electronic publication about electronic documents required that we address readers' requirements as well as our own as publishers, develop and implement the right information model, assemble a top-notch staff, and, in essence, develop a radically new publication methodology. The EIA Electronic Document Report (EDR) is a diskette-based publication that provides critical information and informed perspective about the development, management, delivery, and use of electronic documents as a key requirement of modern business. But the EDR is more than just a new publication about electronic documents. It is a new kind of publication that employs the very technology and tools it describes, and making it work forced us to address the very issues that form its primary editorial content. In doing so, we had to go beyond the current vision of electronic document delivery and reject some of its prevailing tenets. Our experience with the first three issues forced us to rethink some of our own assumptions, too, but our insistence on moving beyond the current paradigm helped us avoid some serious technical and production problems, opened new business opportunities, and may give us a competitive edge in the future.